Congress has a number of appropriations bills to pass, as you know, and Congress would like nothing better than to use the threat of a government shutdown to ram through all sorts of legislative riders that wouldn't stand the light of day if they tried to pass them on their own -- legislative riders that would hamper the EPA's ability to enforce the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, for example. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject anti-science legislative riders in upcoming budget bills. Your average right-wing Congressperson -- who will generally be smart enough not to say that they oppose pro-science protections because they tend to cost their big donors money -- will probably hang their head unctuously and declare that we just don't have the money to protect folks from pollution. At that point, you're perfectly free to ask, "do we have endless money to take care of the intractable health care problems that pollution causes?" Of course, their big donors won't bear the cost of those problems -- but we will.
Meanwhile, the ACLU helps you tell the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of police harassing, and retaliating against, folks who film and otherwise monitor their behavior. You probably already know that, try as they might, police officers can't simply tell you to stop running your smartphone camera in their general direction, because that violates your First Amendment rights. Still, if you use your smartphone camera to document police misconduct, they might try some stuff, like taking your camera from you and/or sending a handful of armed officers to arrest you for unpaid traffic tickets, and that just adds to the list of stuff you have to fight -- and discourages others from speaking out. But just as television blew the lid off the Vietnam War by showing its horrors, the age of smartphones has put police brutality out front-and-center. It's not that the good old days were better; it's that the good old days covered up better. But this genie ain't going back in this bottle, and police officers are public servants who should not get special protections (like protection from their own misconduct) while they're serving the public.
Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell McDonald's to get antibiotic-raised beef, poultry, and pork out of its supply chains, and thus out of its meals. It'd be easy to say, oh, to hell with them, they're McDonald's, fast food shouldn't even exist, but that would be letting the perfect murder the good -- we live in a world where plenty of people eat at McDonald's every day, and since we're not likely to observe the disappearance of fast food in our lifetimes, we might as well agitate for better behavior from fast food purveyors. And McDonald's, like the other fast food corporations, has shown itself to be responsive to the Big Stick of Bad PR, which we wield here for very good reason: overuse of antibiotics in feed animals makes bacteria more resistant, until we find ourselves in a "post-antibiotic world," where the slightest cut can be deadly -- just like it was in the old days! Surely even the most reactionary individual doesn't want a return to such "innocence," and surely even the most corporatist individual can see the limits of just letting food producing corporations do exactly as they please.
Comments